Crayons & Pencil Shavings

Thursday, April 24, 2014

I'm always looking for interesting and different ways to help my students remember the vocabulary in our science units. I'm pretty sure I do something different for each unit. That can be good and bad. On one hand it is good for them to learn different strategies. But on the other hand, consistency is helpful.

For this unit I broke them up into pairs and had them define and draw a picture of each vocabulary word. I definitely saw some good group work and some not so good group work. But that is part of life and they really do need to learn how to work through that.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

We had fun learning about electricity a couple of months back. (Ha! Now that I look at this picture I see that he spelled "electric" wrong! Oops!) The students had to color and label the open and closed circuits. Then they had to explain them on the inside of the paper. We even labeled the light switch in the classroom with "open circuit" and "closed circuit." My students loved it when I asked one of them to open the circuit.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

I love love love using Mad Libs in my classroom. They are such a great way to practice grammar.

And the students think they are hilarious!

Often I'll have a list of types of words on the board in the morning. As the students wait for class to start they write a list of those words and we put together the silly paragraph as a group. You never know what is going to happen. That is the fun of it.

Here is the Mad Lib we did this morning:

Bagel (noun): a glazed kid-shaped roll with a fuzzy
texture, made from ducks that are dropped into happily boiling me and then
baked.

Balloon (noun):a
wonderful bag that rises in the bacon when it is filled with hot chicken.

Baseball (noun): a game ran with a bat and a rainbow
loom by two teams of nine birds each. These two teams playunder in the trees and at bat.

Monday, February 24, 2014

My poetry unit is coming up soon! I'm excited!
This year I'm teaching a combo class of 2nd and 3rd grade. When I previously co-taught a combo class we did the poetry unit all together, but because of scheduling I've decided to keep in a 3rd grade thing this year. I have a gut feeling that next year it won't be a combined class so I figure the 2nd grade will get to do it next year when I have them all on their own.